Flutterby™! : Pay To Participate Retraction

‘Pay-to-participate’ autism stem-cells paper retracted

“It’s not really a meaningful contribution to scientific knowledge,” said Turner, who co-authored a critical letter about the study earlier this year with Jeremy Snyder, professor of public health ethics at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, Canada. “It’s more what’s sometimes described as a scientific token of legitimacy to help burnish the marketing credentials of that business.”

From reading this write-up, it also sounds like though the only possible outcome of the study was looking at safety, there were some claims about effect, even though there was no control group, and 20% of the participants dropped out. So, yeah, with the small sample size, any claims are gonna be marred by selection bias.